en came a fresh delight in prayer. "It was very
delightful," she says, "to pray all the time; all day long; not only for
myself, but for the whole world--particularly for all those who
loved Christ." Her views of prayer were Scriptural, and, therefore,
discriminating. She fully accepted Paul's statement that "we know not
what we should pray for as we ought" without the help of the Spirit;
and, therefore, she always spoke of prayer as something to be _learned_.
If she believed that a Christian "learns to pray when first he lives,"
she believed also that the prayer of the infant Christian life was like
the feeble breath of infancy. She understood by prayer something
far more and higher than the mere preferring of petitions. It was
_communion_; God's Spirit responding harmoniously to our own. With
Coleridge she held, that the act of praying with the total concentration
of the faculties is the very highest energy of which the human heart is
capable. Hence she was accustomed to speak of _learning_ the mysterious
art of prayer by an apprenticeship at the throne of grace. She somewhere
wrote: "I think many of the difficulties attending the subject of prayer
would disappear if it could be regarded in early life as an art that
must be acquired through daily, persistent habits with which nothing
shall be allowed to interfere." She saw that prayer is not to be made
dependent on the various emotive states in which one comes to God. "The
question," she said, "is not one of mere delight." The Roman Catholic
poet accurately expressed her thought on this point:

"Prayer was not meant for luxury,
Nor selfish pastime sweet;
It is the prostrate creature's place
At the Creator's feet."

She illustrated in her own quaint way the truth that moods have nothing
to do with the duty of prayer. When one of your little brothers asks
you to lend him your knife, do you inquire first what is the state of
his mind? If you do, what reply can he make but this: "The state of my
mind is, I want your knife."

With her natural temperament and inherited tendencies she might,
perhaps, under other influences have been drawn too far over to the
emotional, or at least to the contemplative side of religious life.
But she saw and avoided the danger. She discerned the harmony and just
balance between the contemplative and the active Christian life, and
felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience. She
attached as little meaning to a life